Weekly Reader Bonus: Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead by Bert V. Royal; A Realistic Brutal Story of Growing Up From Our Favorite Comic Strip Characters

Weekly Reader Bonus: Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead by Bert V. Royal; A Realistic Brutal Story of Growing Up From Our Favorite Comic Strip Characters




By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews




Spoilers: I suppose I should call this the Weekly Viewer since it's a play rather than a book. But many consider plays as important parts of literature as do I. In various previous Lit Lists, I have cited plays like A Raisin in the Sun, Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead, Medea, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys, and A Midsummer Night's Dream as some of my favorites. I also like a challenge so I thought this would be a good try.




There are many of us who wonder what happened to our favorite fictional characters later in life. What if they were hit with real world problems? What if the kids grew up or what happened when the adults were wayward youths? Such books as the Thursday Next series and films as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the upcoming Happytime Murders show what happens when our favorite literary, animated, and puppet characters come face to face with such problems as sexuality, segregation, domestic violence, and crimes. Fanfiction writers explore various possibilities of their favorite characters in different sometimes angstier settings. Last month, I reviewed The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno which explored the adult life of a child detective based on Encyclopedia Brown. Exploring the pasts and futures of beloved characters raise interesting questions which invite various possibilities.




The latest characters to have their later lives exposed and dissected for the world to see are Charles Schultz's Peanuts gang. In the play Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, unauthorized by the Schultz Estate, Bert V. Royal explores the teen years of Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy and the gang and we discover it's a biting grim darker world than the one they knew when they were children.




Because of the unauthorization, none of the characters are called by their real names but we the audience know who they are. When one character called “Van” mourns for his lost blanket we know he's the quiet philosophical Linus. When one character, “Beethoven” retreats to the music room to play his favorite composer, it's not too hard to assume that he is the once musical prodigy Schroeder. Knowing who these characters were makes what happens to them all the more moving and heartbreaking. If Charlie Brown can have an unhappy adolescence, anyone could.




The play begins with the death of CB’s (Charlie Brown) dog and proceeds to get worse from there. First CB graphically describes to his Pen Pal the death of his beloved beagle (Snoopy) after getting put down because he contracted rabies and ate a yellow bird that CB believed “was the beagle’s best friend.” (Woodstock-I told you it would get worse.) The dog’s death sends CB into grief as he questions what happens after we die. While Peanuts often took a philosophical at times spiritual outlook, this play puts those questions front and center as CB ponders the meaning of death.




Far from being the misfit put-upon bullied kid, CB is now a popular jock who does his fair share of bullying. He is best friends with Matt (Pig Pen) who is no longer the nice kid who walked around with a trail of dirt. Instead he is an Obsessive Compulsive bigoted, sexist, homophobe who hates to be reminded of his former life and nickname.

CB is also still best friends with Van (Linus) who is a pothead and has some of the funniest lines in the play. When Van explains that after his blanket was burned, he smoked it's ashes. (“My blanket and I are one,” Van says triumphantly.)

Matt, Van, and CB also hang around with Tricia (Peppermint Patty), the former tomboy turned airheaded party girl and her best friend Marcie (Marcy-the only character to go by her original name), who while still is smart has become  like Tricia, another Mean Girl.
Royal’s decision to make Matt, Tricia, and Marcie antagonists (and Matt is particularly villainous in how he taunts those he bullies) show that sometimes when people grow and change, they not only don't retain the characteristics that they once had but they change for the worse.




The most frequent target for Matt and the other's abuse is no longer CB, but Beethoven (Schroeder). Beethoven has withdrawn into himself since his father had been arrested for molesting him. Instead of sympathies and support, Beethoven's former friends mock, taunt, and beat him for being gay. Even though CB did not bully Beethoven, Beethoven chides him for being worse “because (he) watched it happen” and that of all people, CB would know what it's like to be an outcast. Instead Beethoven keeps to himself even during lunch,where he sits in the music room as he practices the piano. It is in the music room that after a tense moment, Beethoven and CB kiss.




The kiss causes CB to question his feelings and sexuality. He fears hatred and ostracism from his peers. The only person to give him support is the last person anyone would expect: Van’s Sister (Lucy). The best scene in the play is when CB visits Van’s Sister in the psychiatric hospital where she had been staying since she set the Little Red Haired Girl's hair on fire. In one of the two most heartbreaking monologues in the play, Van's Sister reveals that she set the Little Red Haired Girl's hair on fire because Van’s Sister had an abortion and discovered that the LRH Girl called her “a whore.”

The dialogue between CB and Van’s Sister reveals CB’s confusion about the kiss and how he isn't sure whether he loves Beethoven. Van's Sister alternates between common sense advice towards CB’s predicament and accepting her role as an “unrepentant, unremorseful sociopath and (she) has no choice but to believe it.” In their mutual stories of love and hate, CB and Van's Sister reveal themselves as two people trying to find an identity for themselves as people who long to be loved and accepted.




Maturity is a common theme in Dog Sees God. Along with that maturity is the search for identity and realizing who we are and who we want to be. This is revealed by CB’s Sister (Sally) who similar to her song “My Philosophy” in the musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown is always looking for a different identity. Like Van, CB's Sister is seen as a comic relief as she goes from being a Goth girl to a Gangsta rapper. She also does a melodramatic one-woman show “Cocooning Into Platypus." While her one-woman show is hammy at first, she reveals the theme of the play by showing us a caterpillar that transforms into a newly made human who could think, cry, feel, find and lose love.




Finding and losing love is what the play is about. Once CB and Beethoven’s relationship is revealed to the others, they realize how much they have fallen in love. Unfortunately, their happiness is cut short by an angry Matt who is furious that he thinks Beethoven “recruited his friend.” Matt hurts Beethoven in a way that is savage, brutal, and leads to horrible consequences.


The adult world that surrounds the Peanuts gang is a darker one than the days when the kids put ornaments on Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, or when Linus waited in the pumpkin patch for the Great Pumpkin, or when Snoopy stood on his doghouse writing a book or fighting the Red Baron. But the kids know, as everyone else watching them do, they have to grow up sometimes.

1.  But maturity is not always dark or sad. It can also be a world of warmth, kindness, and friendship. This is exemplified in the other great monologue in the play when CB reads a letter from his Pen Pal who tells him that through it all, he is a good man. The most touching moment of all is when the Pen Pal reveals his name as CS, implying that even when his friends taunt CB and his life seems horrible God (or rather Charlie Brown's God and Creator, Charles Schultz) hasn't forgotten him and still loves him.